1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telephony and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for enabling collaboration between running outbound customer contact campaigns in a call center environment.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the art of telephony, contact centers, also termed call centers or call-in centers in the art may be contracted by businesses to engage their customers in sales and service and handle customer relations management. One aspect of customer engagement known to the inventors is termed outbound customer contact in the art. Proactive customer engagement includes outbound contact services. Outbound contact services may be employed within a contact center environment to sell products and services and/or to service customer accounts. Generally speaking, an outbound customer contact campaign is implemented using supporting telephony hardware and software such as an outbound contact server that includes an automated dialing application for dialing customer contact numbers from a list of contact records approved for outbound dialing.
In one system known to the inventor, the dialing of outbound calls is paced using a pacing algorithm that works to place calls based on known or predicted resource availability. Also known to the inventor is a system for monitoring and detecting dialing states and results of dialing such as the state of busy, no-answer, answer by incorrect party, answer by correct party, wrong number, and so on. When a customer answers an outbound call, it may be routed to an available agent as an inbound call.
In some cases multiple agents are dedicated to outbound contact. Typically, the initial answer of an outbound call is treated by an interactive voice response application whereby the customer may have the options of declination, treatment by a live agent, or treatment by an automated system or process such as an automated order process. In a call center (CC) environment, there may be several outbound contact campaigns running simultaneously and customer records may be accessed by these outbound campaigns from a customer database the records including the telephone numbers to call and at least the identification of the customers.
One problem with the art of proactive outbound customer contact is that while there may be several campaign instances running within a call center environment, there are currently no known mechanisms that enable the separate campaigns to share data such as pre-dialing results, dialing states, and interaction results in real time with one another. Campaigns that run concurrently are relatively isolated from one another accept for possibly sharing access to a data storage system for retrieving contact records data and for checking if individual contacts are on a do-not-call (DNC) list. The isolation of the campaigns from other campaigns increases redundancy in campaign activity and can draw negative results.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a system for enabling collaboration resulting in corrective action between two or more customer contact campaigns running within a call center environment. A system such as this would reduce redundant activities by the campaigns and would improve overall efficiency and success rate of the campaigns.